Faith-based treatment

Lisa Shrewsberry
The Register-Herald
— PINEVILLE, W.Va.
In God’s economy, everything has purpose. So believes Debra Curry-Davis, founder and executive director of One Voice Inc., a faith-based recovery program in Wyoming County.
As she tours her offices in Pineville (a renovated parsonage, offered for use by Cook Memorial Baptist Church) she opens the door to a basement lined in bags filled with ready-to-eat beef stews and snacks. Pudding cup high-rises form against the walls, part of foodstuffs to be distributed directly to at-risk children, many with parents who are substance abusers and haven’t the means or the motivation to provide hot meals for their kids at home.
Curry-Davis, a teacher by profession, says kids in her towns come to school for “breakfast, lunch and love. They are not concerned with ABCs or 123s. We are meeting their basic needs.”
Many educators operate in crisis mode — the circumstances embattling kids at home adding a complicated dimension to education as usual, virtually erasing the carefree days once connoted by the word                    “childhood.”
Curry-Davis says the bag distribution, particularly important during long school breaks like the recent holidays, was Petra Brown’s idea. Brown is a local pharmacist who took an interest in One Voice’s mission of offering resources to help addicts and transform communities. She is one of a troop of regular volunteers refusing to turn a blind, busy eye to the blatant drug abuse problem in Wyoming and contiguous counties.
“When people can point to a house and know that cars are pulling in and out, people coming in and out and they are not family, when they know the activity is drug related — then there’s a problem in that community,” says Curry-Davis.
Of the problem in Wyoming in particular, Kandy Clay, volunteer administrative assistant and program director and county resident, concurs. “People are being brazen about it. They’re doing it right in the daylight, standing in the streets, and they’re not afraid of law                         enforcement.”
In fact, add Curry-Davis and Clay, Sheriff Randall Aliff estimates the number of drug overdoses resulting in death at two per week.
“It’s a known thing,” states Clay.
Curry-Davis, who equips groups with traditional 12-step program training and resources, resists the label “once an addict, always an addict.” She has never personally experienced addiction of any kind, but like so many others, has struggled with addiction within her own family.
“We also have a one-step program,” she states, testifying to the power of God as key to filling the vacuous soul that feeds itself on drugs and alcohol. Like the pudding cups bought by Brown on double coupon day with donation money, where 3.5 ounces will serve to quell a child’s hunger, Curry-Davis is confident every addict has a God-given reason to be here, a purpose greater than their packaging.
At a table set for guests in the entryway of One Voice, Clay, Curry-Davis and a jovial woman who introduces herself as “Stephanie” nibble on cheese, crackers and apples while Stephanie shares her journey from addicted, jobless and depressed to recovering, gainfully employed and whole. The casual moment of camaraderie is in stark contrast to Stephanie’s dark history of injecting her body with drugs.
Stephanie, hiding her identity because of the stigma attached to recovering addicts, is a former IV drug user who lost her nursing license as a result of her struggles with substance abuse.
“Nursing was all I had ever known,” she states.
Having consumed alcohol excessively since the age of 12 when she remembers taking liquor to school in cough syrup bottles, she is celebrating 26 months of sobriety. What made things click, where her jigsaw pieces finally fit together into a recognizable vision of life, according to Stephanie, was God.
“I wanted to give up whenever everybody was telling me ‘no’. It was like I had rejection stamped on my head.”
She describes interviewing for jobs, openly disclosing her problems with addiction, receiving 12 painful rejections. She wipes away tears as she recalls the first time she abused injection anesthetics. Her husband then, who is now deceased, insisted she bring him the drugs from work. One day, she tried them herself. She was hooked.
Stephanie abstained from substance abuse through two pregnancies, testimony that somewhere deep within, perhaps not for her own life, but for others, she had the ability to change. She, like so many others according to Curry-Davis, sorely lacked the power to stick the hard landing of sobriety — but went back to dependence on alcohol shortly after the birth of each of her children.
She admits to lapses in judgment she wouldn’t dream of making now that she’s sober.
“I was breastfeeding, but was drinking some alcohol. They slept good .” she says, admitting to pumping and dumping if she felt she’d overindulged, but continuing to breastfeed her children for the most part through her drinking.
One day, a hairdresser revealed to Stephanie her troubles with her own husband’s addiction.
“One thing led to another and I pretty much told her my story. She said, ‘There is a lady you have to get in contact with.’”
After exchanging phone numbers, Stephanie says it was Debra who called her later that night — a conversation that would prove to be her cement toward further recovery.
“I have no doubt He exists now,” Stephanie explains. She says in a quiet, contemplative moment, God had told her she would get a job, and she did. It is the internally stored encouragement she needed to move forward in confidence.
Now, Stephanie not only works, but she shares her story of sobriety with others, many traveling aimlessly along the same broken road she happened down.
“I was spiritually, physically and mentally bankrupt. Everyone had been telling me God was the answer; I just didn’t know how to get there from here.”
“I really don’t think you can have recovery without faith,” explains Curry-Davis.
“Some people need 12 steps, they need the structure offered by those programs. For some, they can say in faith, ‘I am a new creature in Christ, I am more than a conqueror.’”
Her faith-based program isn’t one to tolerate judgment. She receives calls to her personal phone for support from addicts around the clock — those recovering seek her to guide them in overcoming stumbling blocks, redeveloping a sense of self and relying on their faith to cope.
“They just know we are real and we really care. They are with us enough that they know we are genuine. We have no expectations of them when they come to us for help.”
“Debbie really taught me how to pray,” concludes Stephanie. “I always thought prayer had to be long, drawn out and formal, and that you had to say the right words. It’s more or less talking to God like He’s a good friend. Without God in my life, I am an alcoholic and a drug addict. With Him, I am by the grace of God a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.”
When Curry-Davis began One Voice 6½ years ago at God’s prompting, she would have never believed she would gain attention for the addicted coalfields from Washington, D.C.
“Sen. (Joe) Manchin’s office did a roundtable in Beckley and invited me there in the fall. Manchin came back to Oceana Middle School to present to the student body.”
She invited him to spend a few more minutes at another roundtable, this one with youth of the community seated round, uniting to share their experiences.
“He listened as one child who said he was an athlete couldn’t go to the park because he was always approached to buy, sell or do drugs. Another student said her father had been hurt when he became addicted to pain medications. There were two students who told about finding a gun at their bus stop .” challenges once reserved for larger cities, now come home in concentrate to West Virginia’s rural communities.
While attention from esteemed politicians helps, Curry-Davis maintains the onus is upon the local church body to assist addicts in reforming their lives — without judgment and in unconditional love.
The problem is so prevalent, her group doesn’t have time to spend on casual queries — they are looking for groups and individuals ready for the commitment it takes to walk the addicted through to sobriety, to be inspired by their own unique ways to fill the chasms ahead of lives spiraling out of control, to recognize the potential in a pudding cup and in a broken life.
“When churches started being more concerned about the buildings and programs instead of the people, things started getting worse. Our vision is to see recovering addicts minister to addicts, to see churches open their doors to more recovery programs. Churches are the heartbeat of a community.”
For more information, visit www.onevoicewv.com or call 304-732-7701.

F. BRIAN FERGUSON/Associated Press Debra Curry-Davis, center, founder and executive director of One Voice Inc. leads a prayer in her offices in the Cook Memorial Baptist Church in Pineville, W.Va. Curry-Davis says “I really don’t think you can have recovery without faith.” Her team teaches strategies to churches and other groups in combating drug dependency while demonstrating love to the addict.